SCIENCE AND RELIGION 143 



him was greatly influenced by the science of the 

 time, and that, in fact, in his early life he was a 

 scientist rather than a philosopher in the stricter 

 sense. His General Natural History and Theory 

 of the Heavens, written at the age of thirty-one, 

 enables us to follow his transition from science to 

 philosophy, and, more especially, to trace the influ- 

 ence of his theory of the origin of the heavenly 

 bodies on his religious conceptions. 



For part of this theory Kant was indebted to 

 Thomas Wright of Durham (1711-1786). Wright 

 was the son of a carpenter, became apprenticed to a 

 watchmaker, went to sea, later became an engraver, 

 a maker of mathematical instruments, rose to afflu- 

 ence, wrote a book on navigation, and was offered a 

 professorship of navigation in the Imperial Academy 

 of St. Petersburg. It was in 1750 that he pub- 

 lished, in the form of nine letters, the work that 

 stimulated the mind of Kant, An Original Theory 

 or New Hypothesis of the Universe. The author 

 thought that the revelation of the structure of the 

 heavens naturally tended to propagate the principles 

 of virtue and vindicate the laws of Providence. He 

 regarded the universe as an infinity of worlds acted 

 upon by an eternal Agent, and full of beings, tend- 

 ing through their various states to a final perfection. 

 Who, conscious of this system, can avoid being filled 

 with a kind of enthusiastic ambition to contribute 

 his atom toward the due admiration of its great and 

 Divine Author? 



Wright discussed the nature of mathematical cer- 

 tainty and the various degrees of moral probability 

 proper for conjecture (thus pointing to a distinction 



